November 18, 2008

KirubaShow is Back. Interview with LiveJournal's Director



After ages, its good to be podcasting again. The news of the tie up with Business Standard was the boost I needed to get back into play.

This morning I got to have a converation with Benjamin Wegg Prosser, who is Director of Corporate Development of SUP, ("pronounced as Soup, as in Tomato Soup"), better known as the owners of LiveJournal. You can listen to the podcast here.

Live Journal, for those who don't know, is one of the earliest blogging services started way back in 1999 and still continues to be a significant player. The intro was done by Rajesh Lalwani, founder of BlogWorks and who handles LiveJournal's account in India.

Ben has an intereting profile. In his earier job, Ben served as director of strategic communications at Tony Blair's cabinet, Yup, the ex-prime minister of UK. Here, he oversaw a series of innovations including the launch of e-petitions service and the first YouTube channel for any head of government in 2007. Take that Obama!

Prior to Downing Street, Benjamin worked at The Guardian where he held positions as publisher and General Manager of The Guardian's website, handling diferent sections.

Go ahead and listen to the interview. You can also download the interview and load it onto your iPod, mobile phone or your music player and listen to it on the go.

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November 13, 2008

SAP TechEd : Input from the Head of SAP Community Network

It's my third day at the SAP TechEd in Bangalore and there were a few things that caught my eye. The turnout for this event seems to be getting bigger every year. Over 4100 participants turned up from over 135 countries for 3 days of learning from 200 sessions and 360 hours of lectures and hands-on workshops. That's an impressive scale. I was here last year as well and this time I had anticipated it to be much smaller considering the slowdown. Obviously, I anticipated wrong.



The session that really caught my attention was Mark Yolton's keynote speech or the 'appetizer' as he termed it. Mark Yolton is the Senior Vice-President and Head of the SAP Community Network. His was a crisp talk that put quite a bit of things into perspective. Some interesting tidbits and stats from his presentation that will be of interest to us.

* 470 exabytes of information will be created in 2008 By 2011, the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006Would fill more than 5.9 billion iPods. (I hadn't heard of a term called exabytes before. It's supposed to be 1 followed by 18 zeros. Yikes!)

* The U.S. Patent office receives a patent application every 68 seconds.

* There is $1.9 Billion in Global Trade every 60 minutes. The BRIC countries generate 13% of global trade and represent 42% of the world's population.

* 50% of the world's business transactions touch an SAP system 12 million users in 120 countries.

* 75% of SAP customers are SME businesses. 30 new customers join SAP every working day.

* About 1,000 people join an SAP Community Network everyday. If the SAP Community Network were a city, it would rank among the 200 largest in the world and the top 20 in India.

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November 12, 2008

Launching a New Podcast Show with Business Standard Newspaper

The news is already out and figured that I might as well talk about it. Kamla Bhatt was the first to tweet about the news and AgencyFAQs is working out on a story.

Business Standard newspaper and I are joining hands to launch a new Podcast show. The show, understandably, will deal with CXOs and influential personalities. The show will not be restricted to just Tech and will cover other fields as well. This way I get a much wider canvas to play with.

The new Podcast show will be an excellent and a logical extension to the weekly column that I author. The top management at Business Standard have been very supportive and I'm extremely pumped up at the opportunity.

I've already started working on the episodes and we are working towards launching the new show in two week's time. Expect to hear from me more on this soon.

It's interesting that Kamla Bhatt, a popular podcaster, had tied up with The Mint newspaper to luanch a new podcast show. I have a lot of respect for Kamla for her dedication and passion she puts in into her shows. We were fellow-podcasters at PodTech and since gotten to know each other well. It's awesome that established main stream media is realizing the value of joining hands with bloggers and podcasters.

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November 07, 2008

Collaborative Painting During Wikipedia Academy

On November 22nd, when the Wikipedia Academy takes place at our new coworking office, I'm planning a collaborative painting effort. It's simple. We'll have a 10 feet by 8 feet canvas placed on the ground. We'll have lots of colours and many paint brushes in different sizes. We then let loose our imagination. There are no rules. There is no brief given. Anyone is free to do what he or she wants to do. The results can be quite impressive.

I've been thinking of how to include a physical activity that portrays the collaborative effort of Wikipedia and this one fits the bill like a 'T'. The idea is inspired by a similar effort that was done at the iCommons Summit in Sapporo, Japan. Over 300 folks participated and I remember all of having such fun working on it. Take a look at the eventual painting below.







I'm a newbie to painting. Need to find out what kind of canvas materias, what type of paints and what sizes of brushes. Also need to figure where to buy these materials in Chennai. If any of you have an idea, we'd be very grateful for your advice and suggestions. You can leave them at the comments below or mail me at kiruba at kiruba.com. Thanks in advance.

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November 05, 2008

What I See Common in Nokia and Dr.M.S.Swaminathan



The first time I heard about the Information Kiosks scheme in villages many years ago, it caught my attention for two reasons. Reason 1: The scheme was launched in a village in Pondicherry, not far from our village where my family hails from. Reason 2: Dr.M.S.Swaminathan. Yup, the genius behind the scheme. Ever since that eventful meeting I had with him at his office, I have had deep admiration for him and his vision.

What the Information Kiosks did was to help provide information like the existing crop prices and remedies for crop diseases. The experiment created a lot of interest. For many of the villagers, it was their first exposure to Internet and technology, even if it meant on pitifully slow dial-up connections.

Yesterday, when I heard about Nokia's Life Tools scheme, it reminded me again of Dr.Swaminathan's Digital Kiosks scheme. The difference is that instead of a PC, its happening on a mobile device. Instead of everyone coming to a room in a village to access, its now available in your palm. More importantly on entry level, inexpensive mobile phones. Now, farmers can get customized information on crop prices, fertilizers and pesticides based on the farmer's location and his choice of crop.

I personally witnessed how rural folks cleverly use mobile. And almost invariably, it has to do with maximizing their income. During December 2004, as part of the Tsunami relief work, me and a bunch of friends traveled to MGR Thittu near Chidambaram in Tamilnadu. We noticed that the fishermen would venture out into the ocean and before they returned back with their overnight catch, they would call from their mobile phones and find out which markets have more demand and thus willing to pay the highest for their catch. They would accordingly steer their boats to that place. Simple phone calls helped them get better returns. The lesson is that folks will embrace technology if they see a direct monetary benefit.

Will Nokia Life Tools be a success? Yes, if it can help directly benefit like how the fishermen got benefited. While passive benefits like learning English better are good, it ultimately boils down to how can it help get better income. If that happens, the acceptance would be swift. Think of how the lassi wallahs in Chandigarh helped boost washing machine sales.

Any new initiative will take time to be accepted and it needs to be educated, especially when it comes to rural audience. That's the mantle that Nokia seems to have taken.

One thing I have to agree outright is that the best way for technology to reach out to rural India will not be through PCs. It *has* to be through mobile phones. The amount of massive usuage of mobile phones in villages is staggering. I only have to look at my own village to see this. From that angle, there's no doubting the reasoning and the strategies behind the Nokia Life Tools. This project is right now in a pilot stage and is expected to roll out during first half of 2009.

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